Bertrik, Laura and I worked on the book on Wednesday. The illumination for 1989 is taking shape, with some of the people filled in. Bertrik and I put extra gesso on most of the pages that won't stick. We used the second batch of cold gesso, and added a little extra sugar. We're not sure if the problem is not enough sugar, or the layer of gesso needed to be thicker which might mean that more sugar rises to the surface.

Right now the gold work seems to be the critical thing to work on. The gold sticks to the red ink, so it should be put on before any writing is done (allthough, writing this, I realize I can write the text, and then fill in the capitals after the gold is put on). The gesso needs to harden for a few days, and then I'll try to do some gold work. Then I can continue writing on the introduction, 1988 and the rest of 1989.

Some years I could write text for, but the text needs to be worked on first (1993, which has a bit too much text, and 1994, which has no text at all).

Back to reality

Tonight 3 of us continued work, and hit some snags. First of all we very usefully spent some time discussing the garters we are weaving for November Nights, so we started kind of late.

For some reason the gesso completely refused to take the gold, so the gold work got suspended, hoping it's just the weather, which has been weird the last couple of weeks anyway.

We admired Turmstadt's book, which is beautiful, and a much better example of realistic planning... It's very impressive, and it was actually done in time. It also contains a very nice map of the Shire and its surroundings which we'll take as an example for the map that is planned for our book.

Yvonne did some work on the illumination for year 3 (1989) and I wrote 1/3 page of text for 1989, and we put the pictures in the previous posting, so the night was not completely wasted...

I'm starting to think that the writing might not be a terrible bottleneck, since all the jobs are pretty time consuming. Maybe everything will balance out in work hours. 3 evenings for an illumination, 3 evenings for doing gold on one page, 3 evenings for writing one page?

Shire workshop

We had the gathering on Sunday and flew through the work! 6 people were seated at the table doing red and blue borders and leaves, whitework and lots of gesso. It's really motivating to see some of the pages that are (almost) completely done now. We're sitting here imagining what it will be like to leaf through the book when it's all done...

Klusjes voor de workshop:

• tekst bijwerken/maken
• illuminaties verven
• rechterpagina's naast illuminatie extra regels onderaan toevoegen zodat ze gelijk eindigen met de linkerpagina.
• blokjes blauw/rood verven rond letters en illuminaties
• goudverf om laatste dingetjes af te maken op goudverfpagina's
• blaadjes/balkjes verven
• whitework
• penwerk
• vergulden
• schrijven > mits tekst uitgevogeld is

Word counts

We're counting words and looking how they will fit on the page.

For 1987 the original text has 39 lines of text in Times New Roman on an A4 sheet. After writing the first two pages we calculated that about 13 lines fit on a page (average of a page with illumination and a page with no decoration around it). This meant that we had room for about 54 lines of text, and so we were short of text.

I made up about 5 extra lines, so there's a total of 44 lines now. I've written to the end of page 3 and now have 9,5 lines left over for the last page. That means I can fit about 5 more extra lines on that page if it also fits 13 lines, and there is room for a total of 50 lines, not 54.

Update sept. 3rd: I finished the text for 1987, and changed my mind so many times about whether or not the text would fit, skipping text and then making up extra sentences that I lost track... The last sentence was a new one and ended exactly at the end of the last line...

Next I'm planning to start on 1993 (the year of the Green Knight). For this year we have 55 lines of text in Arial, which means more words on the page then for 1987. After looking at the previous year and how it fit on the page, I'll start out skipping words here and there to shorten the text a little.